Anjasaurus

OS X and Windows

My last project has been.. I’m not sure if I should call it complicated. It all started at home, with Mum and Dad and my sister. My sister played Anno, and I was jealous of her as I wasn’t able to play it on my Mac, it’s a Windows game.

So, naturally, I started thinking of dual booting my Mac, to be able to play games while I’m traveling too. My Mac is my baby, I mostly bring it when I go somewhere. And then it started to get complicated :P

Firstly, I would need to partition my Mac HDD, which means I need to back it up in case something goes wrong. Backing up should be easy, huh, I have Time Machine? Well, if my external drive hadn’t been NTFS it had been easy. OS X can’t write to NTFS without 3rd party tools, and Windows can’t even read from Apple’s file system. I discussed it a lot with friends, which way would be best (thank you for all your help!), and in the end I decided to partition my external drive and use two different file systems.

I moved all the files on my external drive to my PC, then I used OS X to partition the drive and format it. I made one Apple partition on 100 GB (HFS+?) and one FAT partition on 150 GB. If I left the 150 GB unformatted, my Windows machine wouldn’t find it at all, so I had to use FAT. And then move the drive to my PC and reformat the FAT partition to NTFS. Very clever.. But it all worked out eventually, and now my Winplutt ("Wintiny") partition houses my backup for W7, and the Macplutt ("Mactiny") is synced with Time Machine on OS X. Neat!

Stupid technology

I’ve been using Google Calendar as my primary calendar for quite a while. Then I got an iPhone, which means I’d rather have my life on that one that I actually bring with me everyday. But I realised now that I’m so used to Google Calendar that I get really irritated when I can’t use the big screen and proper keyboard, and I need to find my phone when I want to check something.

I tried an application/service called NuevaSync, but the problem is that it syncs over the 3G network, and I don’t have an unlimited data plan. It would cost too much in the end.

So, now you can guess I’m quite irritated. Google Calendar doesn’t want to sync with iPhone natively, NuevaSync is great but too expensive in the long run.. Apple doesn’t like Windows/Microsoft.. (ok, maybe they do, I don’t know).
Google ftw though. I finally found out that Google has made their own little application to sync with Microsoft Outlook. And iPhone can sync with Outlook! Now I have a beautiful workaround with three-way-syncing. I’m sure something will go wrong with this three-company-solution, but for now it works, and I’m glad. :)

Minor detail: Outlook can’t handle several Google calendars, so I’m back to monotone calendar :( And I loved the colors!